Lewis H. Lapham (b. January 8, 1935) is an American writer. He was the
editor of the American monthly Harper's Magazine from 1976 until
1981, and from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder of Lapham's
Quarterly, a quarterly publication about history and literature, and
has written numerous books on politics and current affairs. (Clic
here for full Wikipedia article)

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A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism
sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to
make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect
Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went
wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic.

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression,
whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its
business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy
it.

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any
kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read
like the casualty reports from a lost war.

At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I
know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the
relation between profit and theft.

By the word 'liberty' they meant liberty for property, not liberty for
persons.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which
we defend the future against the past.

Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to
the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous
practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and
disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit,
the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without
thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of
tax-deductible wealth.

I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading
of the will.

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas
or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as
badly dressed.

If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in
its place?

In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and
another song.

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as
votive offering and pagan ornament.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of
character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual
effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of
self-restraint.

Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many
people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to the light of
judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of
efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way
of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets.

Most of the ladies and gentlemen who mourn the passing of the nation's
leaders wouldn't know a leader if they saw one. If they had the bad luck
to come across a leader, they would find out that he might demand
something from them, and this impertinence would put an abrupt and
indignant end to their wish for his return.

Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich;
never in the history off the world have so many of those same people
felt themselves so poor.

Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions,
many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?

Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the abstract idea that all men are
created equal, we do everything in our power to prove ourselves unequal.
Among the world's peoples, none other belongs to so many clubs,
associations, committees and secret societies.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to
be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no
individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of
everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes
wrong.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans
never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the world's wealth
has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of
credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions
of disbelief.

Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American
box- complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a
MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First
Amendment.

The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality.
Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow
who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the
doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right
to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even
chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose
grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of
democracy.

The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient
government as they were wary of democracy, a 'turbulence and a folly'
that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.

The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed
than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the
gridiron - and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and
the ring - embody the American dream of Eden.

The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.

The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to
to notice the unbearable lightness of being.

Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and
profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as
luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an
illusion of perfect innocence.

Unlike every other other nation in the world, the United States defines
itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.

We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever
seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

We need not seek our own best selves, and in the meantime we inoculate
ourselves against the viruses of age and idealism, which, as the
advertising agencies well know, depress sales and sour the feasts of
consumption

Well aware of both the continuity and contingency of human affairs,
Adams and Madison searched the works of Tacitus and Voltaire and Locke
like carpenters rummaging through their assortment of tools, knowing
that all the pediments were jury-rigged, all the provisional, all the
alliances temporary.

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American
folklorist, anthropologist, and author. Of Hurston's four novels and
more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best
known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)

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A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering
without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through
indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine
emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half
gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to
eat chickens.

Bitterness is the coward's revenge on the world for having been hurt.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

If we are unwilling to let our ideals cost us anything, our ideals
aren't worth anything.

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed
it.

If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t
hide it.

It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and
dream dreams.

It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a
bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble,
and then not worth much after you get it.

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

No, I do not weep at the world. I'm too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.
It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my
company? It is beyond me.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it,
sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own
food.

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing
things for them.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.